Northumberland

The Hexham Heads

In February 1971 two boys digging a garden behind a house on Rede Avenue in Hexham turned up two small stone heads. A neighbour soon reported seeing a half-man, half-wolf at night, the researcher Anne Ross said the same creature had appeared to her in her own house in Southampton, and the heads were declared Celtic and eighteen hundred years old. Then Desmond Craigie, a previous occupant of the house, came forward: he had made them in 1956 for his daughter Nancy, out of concrete and sand. To prove it he made a third in front of witnesses, indistinguishable from the others. Geologists confirmed the material was cast concrete with quartz sand, not carved stone.